Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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“The North…was witnessing the first attempt at saturation coverage. As a mass of correspondents jostled for positions, the very strength of their numbers began to militate against good reporting. Comradeship and compassion vanished in the race for exclusive news. One correspondent begged a wounded officer not to die before he had finished interviewing him and, as an inducement, promised him that his last words would appear in “the widely-circulated and highly influential journal I represent.”
Accuracy became a minor consideration. Casualties were grossly underestimated; generals listed as killed lived on to die of old age; battles were reported on days when there was no action at all; at times the whole Southern army was reported to be marching on Washington; Atlanta was reported captured a week before the battle for the town took place. It was a small step from ignoring accuracy to faking whole reports. Junius Browne of the New York Tribune collected from officers details of the Battle of Pea Ridge (March 1862) and wrote a brilliant, but entirely imaginary, “eye-witness” report.
(After Manassas], the first clash of the war…indications of Northern superiority had sent the Northern war correspondents hurrying to Washington to write accounts of a great victory. Although the Associated Press managed to get news of this momentous defeat to the telegraph office, to be sent to New York, it went no farther. The general-in-chief of the Northern forces, Winfield Scott, had stopped its transmission, and so the results of the first major act of censorship in the war was chaos, with all the New York newspapers carrying stories of a glorious victory that was, in fact, a scandalous defeat.
The Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, began to dicker with casualty figures. He altered an account of Grant’s failure at Petersburg, reducing the losses to about a third of their actual number. His department withheld the news of the surrender of Harper’s Ferry for twenty-four hours and changed “10,000 Union troops surrendered” first to “6,000” and in later dispatches to “4,000.” The actual figure was 11,200.
Stanton took to censoring newspapers that had broken censorship rules, arresting editors, threatening proprietors with court-martial, and banning correspondents from the front, and he actually issued orders for Henry Wing of the New York Tribune to be shot for refusing to hand over a dispatch he had written for his newspaper.
What other stories did correspondents miss…or refrain from writing? One of the cruel facts of the war was that the North, although it considered itself to be fighting for the survival of democracy, could not raise enough volunteers willing to risk their lives for this cause. The South claimed that Northern men of military age were so unwilling to join the army that the majority of the Union troops were foreigners….taking the official figures, one soldier in three was foreign, most of them being German or Irish. Some eastern States had to introduce a bounty system to fill their regiments, a practice that led to men being shanghaied into service, when conscription was introduced in 1863. Many posed the question the North was reluctant to ask: if the cause of the Union was such a noble one, why was there such violent opposition to the idea of fighting for it?”
(The First Casualty, The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. Phillip Knightly, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975, pp. 26-29)
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Northern Newspapers, Censorship and Mercenaries
